In the gallery at Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, two portraits hang side-by-side, "The Artist" and "The Artist's Wife." They were painted in 1815. Not much else is known about them, not even the name of the artist, who ironically immortalized himself without identifying himself.

Five-year-old Ruhee Lalla of West Hartford sat at a table recently making a little terrarium with a plastic globe, moss, sticks, rocks, shells and twine. All around her at other tables, other children made terrariums while their parents watched. The...

While the artists who founded the Old Lyme Art Colony in Florence Griswold's home were indisputably talented, they owe some of their success to the hospitality and inspiration of their landlady.
Visitors now flock to the charming yellow home-turned-...

In the late 19th century, artist Martha Lamb observed that the variety of landscapes in the town of Old Lyme "would drive an artist to distraction."
Her comment was prophetic. Within a few decades after she made that statement, Old Lyme was home to a...

The history of visual art in Connecticut usually is traced to the first professional painter, William Johnston of Boston, who began working in the region around 1762.
But, as Susan P. Schoelwer notes in the introduction to a new scholarly catalog, "at...

HOW IT GOT ITS NAME: Likely named after Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, in England. A settler, Matthew Griswold, apparently left England from the port of Lyme Regis.
ORIGINS: Set off from Saybrook in 1665, the town was incorporated in 1855 as South Lyme. The name changed to Old Lyme in 1857; the use of "old" was an imitation of Old Saybrook, which had been incorporated as the south part of the town of Saybrook in 1852.
ART COLONY: In 1899, Old Lyme resident Florence Griswold turned her family home and 12...